After tirelessly poring over the Special Counsel's recently released findings, The Onion can confidently report that our award-winning team of legal analysts have concluded their official count of how many pages are in the Mueller Report. The Onion has employed a rigorous, exhaustively thorough multi-stage process to unequivocally confirm the exact page count of the document, and we're proud to share our verified results with the world today: The Mueller Report is 448 pages long.

It was not easy to arrive at such a specific conclusion. We established that the report was really long when we unsuccessfully tried to staple the thick stack of papers together, so our best-in-the-field legal experts deployed several methodologies and then cross-referenced each individual result to bolster the veracity of our findings. Our first approach was to comb through the report sheet by sheet and keep a running tally of each page. The legal scholars then determined beyond a reasonable doubt that there weren't two pages stuck together.

This approach took several attempts, however, as our team of highly paid attorneys lost count of the total halfway through and had to start all over again.

The final result was then corroborated by our second method, spreading each individual page of the report into a large grid on the floor, counting the number of pages on the X axis and Y axis, and then multiplying them to arrive at the final number, which, again, is exactly 448. Our legal analysts also spent hours debating whether to include the table of contents. Many of our world-renowned lawyers expressed concerns that the special counsel may have been trying to pad out the report with the long, sprawling section. Consensus was eventually forged with the agreement that even though the report featured several pages containing only a paragraph or two, (page three, for example) they would indeed be included as a full page in the final totals.

This carefully nuanced approach on all possible page count variables, led by the greatest legal minds the nation has to offer, is what we believe separates The Onion from less honorable publications that engaged in rampant speculation and recklessly jumped to conclusions by simply flipping to the end of the report and publishing the number at the bottom of the page. Having now published the definitive page count of 448, this analysis will be our final update on the Mueller Report.

UPDATE: We can now confirm that doubling the font size of the Mueller Report increases the total length to approximately 896 pages.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.